How to value your Loot (for Adventurers) NFTs?
Recently, another new project has emerged and has quickly rocked the NFT community. It is about Loot (for Adventurers), an NFT collection on the Ethereum blockchain. The collection stands out for its creative freedom and is entirely driven by the community. Moreover, it has already inspired many derivative projects.
Launched only on August 27th, the project has grown on a breathtaking scale hitting the charts. For now, Loot has reached over 69.3K ETH in total sales volume (over $262M). The floor price for a Loot bag on OpenSea currently sits at 4.2 ETH, or about $18.9k.
Let's dive deep into Loot's ecosystem and explore why the collection has seen so much success in such a short time.
Table of contents
Introduction to the Loot project
Loot bag rarity analysis
The evolving Loot ecosystem
Closing thoughts
Introduction to the Loot project
Loot was initiated by a simple tweet from Dom Hofmann, one of the co-founders of Vine and the creator of Peach and Byte. At first, it wasn't clear what Loot's value and utility were. Loot’s NFTs are displayed as a text list bag of adventurer gear. Each Loot NFT is composed of 8 attributes, reminiscent of what you can get in any RPG: swords, armor, clothing, wands, etc. According to the official website (which by the way is open-source), stats, images, and other functionality are intentionally omitted for others to interpret. The developers themselves aren’t trying to do anything else, leaving the project fully up to the community’s collective imagination.
Loot was launched as free-to-mint NFTs with a total of 8,000 NFT Loot bags, requiring collectors to mint directly from the smart contract and paying only the gas fee. It didn’t take long for all 8,000 loot bags to be claimed (under 4 hours). For now, secondary markets are experiencing increased activity.
Once all the early collectors received their bags, the community began to explode - the Discord channel for Loot collectors and enthusiasts counts over 81k members while the project’s Twitter account already has over 61,6 k followers. Currently, the obscure text list bag has led to numerous derivatives, incentives, and extensions, building an entire ecosystem based on the original concept.
Loot bag rarity analysis
As mentioned above there are a total of 8,000 bags. Each Loot bag contains 8 items: a piece for an adventurer's chest, foot, hand, head, neck, ring, waist, and weapon. Because of the creative freedom granted to the owners, each item may be perceived in a different way.
When it comes to the evaluation of Loot bags, the community has established a wide array of rarity evaluation tools. The list of the rarity evaluators can be found on the Resources page on the Loot website. The current method relies on a statistical analysis of the data and evaluates the bags based on how many times each attribute appears in the entire collection.
For example, the Loot NFT bag #3043 is the rarest one within the collection as it has the highest concentration of rare traits. You could find a complete list of bags sorted by rarity following the Loot attributes and rarities sheet by @AustinGreen.
However, the data-based rarity approach alone is not enough. As the project grows, the community already sets up different Guilds divided by items and attributes that bring a personal perspective on value and rarity.
Several days after the release of the Loot project, Dom Hofmann announced Synthetic Loot NFTs which is “a virtual form of Loot that every wallet has automatically and does not need to be minted”. So, it is generated based on your Ethereum wallet address. These are not considered as part of the original collection, however, they might allow participation in Loot Derivative projects.
The evolving Loot ecosystem
As mentioned above, the Loot NFT project led to further expansion and became the basis for many derivative projects. For now, there are at least 3 different Loot communities including Loot Talk forum, 15 developer tools, more than 80 derivatives, 9 guilds, and even a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), created by Will Papper, exclusively for Loot bag owners.
In some cases, the derivative projects are very similar to the original, and yet they continue to complement the Loot universe as they contribute to game development. While others have a completely different shape and can go on endlessly. Because Loot is decentralized, they can be announced in the official Loot Discord channel, recognized by the community and submitted on the Loot Resources page.
NFT collectors who hold at least one Loot bag can participate in all of them (and in some cases holders of a synthetic Loot bag).
Let's take a look at some of the appealing derivatives of the increasingly expanding Loot universe.
Adventure gold ($AGLD)
Adventure Gold was launched on Sept. 2, 2021, and allowed each owner of a Loot NFT to claim 10,000 tokens for free. Basically, it is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), created by Will Papper, to “set a standard for projects building on Loot in the future.” It is intended to be used as a governance token and have users vote on future in-game credits or future mints that will be built based on Loot and AGLD adoption.
At the time of publication, Adventure Gold price is $3.59 USD
Realms
This project expands the Loot ecosystem by giving each holder the option to mint a Realm NFT. 8000 Realms for 8000 Loot. “Every realm has been procedurally generated and is unique down to the language.’’ It contains a map showing the regions, cities, rivers and topography that exist in the world.
Loot Bibliotheca
Bibliotheca proposes a solution of ‘consolidation and graphing of community projects into a single queryable graph, all voted on by the community. So basically, it aims to consolidate community-voted projects with the idea of ‘building a framework to allow easy inclusion of community projects into Bibliotheca.’
Abstract Loot
Abstract Loot is the first collection designed from the Loot project's metadata. It is a collection of generative and animated artworks. Loot bags are the foundational element, however, the end result is something completely different.
Closing thoughts
The Loot project is certainly one of the biggest innovators in the NFT community. Furthermore, this project introduces a whole new ideology to the NFT space. Debuting as text-listed NFTs with no particular intent, Loot shows how the project could evolve in a decentralized, fully community-driven manner. With the potentially limitless possibilities of derivative projects, Loot marked the beginning of a whole new type of NFT ecosystem.
By providing the community with the ultimate level of creativity and freedom, interest in the project continues to grow. Needless to say, the development of the entire Loot ecosystem is driving and the future of the project is interesting to observe as new derivative collections and dapps are being added.